servo-embedding-example VS spidermonkey-embedding-examples

Projects that tried to make servo embeddable are all dead and gone (see https://github.com/paulrouget/servo-embedding-example for example)

So yeah last time I tried to use gecko I failed and didn't try again (years ago) nobody is willing to do the work and mozilla seems to focus more on other stuff...

The problem is that embedding servo is not that easy. This is the only info I found on it:

https://github.com/paulrouget/servo-embedding-example

And it is a 4-year old example.

This, from the same author, is also abandoned: https://github.com/paulrouget/servo-embedding-api

https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/18479

I don't think that embedding is their focus at all, although it does sound like a killer feature to keep the project alive.

No, not yet. But Servo can be used headless:

https://github.com/paulrouget/servo-embedding-example

And the fact that polkit uses it is why debian and ubuntu use an ancient version of polkit. And fwiw, there is an effort to replace spidermonkey in polkit with something else, like duktape.

Also js78 uses the version of spidermoneky from Firefox 78. The current Firefox ESR is 91 (released in august), but I don't see any js91 package, and https://github.com/mozilla-spidermonkey/spidermonkey-embeddi... still says to use the 78 ESR. Note that ESR78 is end of life and no longer receives security updates.

And from what I understand, there is no attempt at backwards compatibility in the spidermonkey interface, so each upgrade requires a lot of changes to the embedding program.

Yes, it is possible to embed spidermonkey, but there are a lot of challenges.

If SpiderMonkey works for you for this purpose, what's changed? It has been available (but officially unsupported) as a standalone embedding target for many many years. Though it hasn't necessarily been easy to figure out the state of things; we're hoping to do better with this new site. The examples repository https://github.com/mozilla-spidermonkey/spidermonkey-embeddi... makes it a lot more approachable.

Also, if you come find us on https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#spidermonkey:mozilla.org or https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/spidermonkey we're happy to help out with the kinds of projects you're talking about. We might even be able to assist with making at least some of the instrumentation points more stable.